BOOKS: Framingham poet crafts 'Intimacy With The Wind'

FRAMINGHAM - For Carla Schwartz, poetry is “my way of being a citizen in the world.”

A poet since childhood, the Framingham resident recently published “Intimacy With The Wind,” a collection of deeply personal poems about the everyday moments that shape our lives.

Schwartz examines familiar events for the hiding-in-plain-sight revelations of familial love, joy, grief and natural beauty to craft her poems in “accessible” language, notable for its precision and honesty.

She writes about how years of planting asparagus stimulated lingering memories of her parents. She recalls a spontaneous dance to a favorite song and a kiss melding with the final note.

She transforms routine gum surgery into a perceptive meditation on the ways strangers’ lives intersect when they least expect it.

“Poetry is a way to reach out to others,” said Schwartz, who spent her early career teaching electrical engineering in several colleges and as a technical writer. “There’s something in me that has an impetus to create art in a way that I can reach other people.”

Since retiring in 2014 from academic pursuits, Schwartz has taken her creative impulses into multiple directions. In addition to publishing two volumes of poetry, she is an active blogger, filmmaker, photographer and lyricist.

She said the 67 poems in “Intimacy” were written after living with her boyfriend as “total nomads” on a solar-powered houseboat named “Wake With The Sun” moving across Lake Champlain in a season that revealed shifting connections between the natural and emotional landscapes of people’s lives.

She said its title was inspired by William McCullough’s biography of Orville and Wilbur Wright who said in order to understand flight, “one had to be intimate with the wind.”

“The poems in ‘Intimacy With the Wind’ are accessible and touch on everyday emotional themes. …” said Schwartz. “(My) poetry doesn’t fly over your head or tease you. It provides you with a straightforward reflection of common thoughts and feelings, one poem at a time.”

Her second collection of poetry, “Intimacy With The Wind” was published by Finishing Line Press, a Georgetown, Kentucky, company that specializes in poetry. It is available on Amazon.com.

Schwartz’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Aurorean, Fourth River, Cactus Heart , Gyroscope and others. She recently read her recent poems at Avidia Bank in Framingham and has appeared at Wake Up and Smell the Poetry in Hopkinton and has appearances planned at Gallery 55 in Natick on April 19 and Garden in the Woods in Framingham on May 6.

Local poets and critics agree Schwartz has forged a unique voice and painter’s eye for telling details, expressed with luminous clarity.

Author Fred Marchant said, “These finely-crafted poems give us this poet’s vivid sense of being in the world, as if we are with her breathing in what life has to offer, a good wind overhead, like a blessing.”

Singer-songwriter Terence Hegarty credited Schwartz for her sensitivity to language that makes her aware “that words have echoes and can be used in a way that allows each word and each combination of words to resonate as far as they can go, ultimately into mystery so the strange beauty of our lives … is made manifest.”

Growing up with a mother who was a mathematician and artist and a father who was a physicist, Schwartz recalled teaching herself to read at age 3 by memorizing passages from Dr. Seuss.

She began writing rhyming poetry in the third grade and though she has dramatically changed her style, she has always felt “compelled” to write.

“If I were stuck in a room with no pen, I’d make up songs until I memorized them,” she said.

Despite her literary interests, Schwartz earned a doctorate in electrical engineering at Princeton University and then taught at McGill University in Monteal and the University of Florida. She later became an expert in complex control systems and took positions at MathWorks in Natick and later, Dassault Systems in Waltham, working for seven years as a technical software writer.

For the last three years, Schwartz has devoted herself to varied creative pursuits, including a YouTube channel, a blogand a website that showcases her photography, poetry and videos.

Poet-educator Susan Jo Russell believes Schwarz’s ecumenical creative outlets reflect a shared interest in the ways the search for “intimacy” draws readers and viewers “into encounters with the natural world, with the self, with family, and with connections among all of these.”

She said Schwartz’s “images move us to reflect on what there is to learn from the simple offerings of the world, on subtle interactions with family, on our search for what it means to be human.”

Schwartz’s blog can be viewed at wakewiththesun.blogspot.com. Learn more about her at carlapoet.com.